Small town sees big role in future

West Point says it's now or never to craft political, economic changes

WEST POINT - It sounds like an action thriller movie plot: a band of unlikely allies joins forces in a depressed former logging town to thwart grave robbers, restore the town's industrial base and battle global climate change.

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By Dana M. Nichols

recordnet.com

By Dana M. Nichols

Posted Dec. 6, 2008 at 12:01 AM

By Dana M. Nichols

Posted Dec. 6, 2008 at 12:01 AM

» Social News

WEST POINT - It sounds like an action thriller movie plot: a band of unlikely allies joins forces in a depressed former logging town to thwart grave robbers, restore the town's industrial base and battle global climate change.

But the two dozen state, local, federal and nonprofit agency leaders who met Friday in a tiny office in West Point are deadly serious. And they say the new administration about to be sworn in in Washington as well as anticipated federal spending to create jobs, repair infrastructure and aid conversion to a more energy-efficient economy make this the time to craft a plan and set it in motion.

"These were towns that were left for dead. We had eight mills. Now we have none," said Calaveras County Supervisor Steve Wilensky, who represents the West Point area and who invited state and local officials to the meeting.

Jim Branham, the executive director of the state government's Sierra Nevada Conservancy, facilitated the meeting. Among those present were Stanislaus National Forest Supervisor Susan Skalski; Bill Haigh, head of the Bureau of Land Management's Folsom office; and representatives from the California Department of Fish and Game as well as a number of private agencies that work on environmental and economic issues in the Sierra.

What they will do is draft a plan that would use federal infrastructure spending and other funding sources to solve long-standing problems, such as the risk of catastrophic forest fires and to create new industries like biomass electricity generation plants fueled with the small-diameter brush that must be removed to restore forests to health.

"I think we have a big role in it," Skalski said of the Stanislaus National Forest and its 900,000 acres.

To put it in a nutshell: Political and economic changes now happening may finally prompt the larger society that benefits from wood, water and clean air the region provides to pay for proper care of the Sierra and its forests, some officials say. Several of those at Friday's meeting said that climate change, and the likelihood that President-elect Barack Obama's administration will agree to international limits on discharges of carbon into the atmosphere, will be key to that future.

For example, a cap-and-trade system like that used in Europe to limit discharges would mean that owners of forested land could get paid to make sure that carbon remains locked up in forests rather than cut down or burned. That, in turn, is also part of a shift to finding ways to profit from small-diameter brush rather than by clear-cutting and selling only large-diameter trees.

And when brush is burned, it should be done for a profit in an electricity-producing plant where emissions can be controlled, officials say.

"We can do green energy," Wilensky said.

A federally funded jobs training program in West Point has already created crews with the necessary skills to remove brush from overgrown forests and chip it into waste that could be used as garden mulch or as biomass plant fuel.

Wilensky said that Dan Lungren, the area's representative in Congress, is very supportive of that program and that staff from the offices of California's U.S. senators, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, are interested in seeing such efforts expanded into a new industry tied to forest health and environmental restoration.

And such work also could serve to frustrate grave robbers. Under current forest management practices, where most trees are clear-cut but archeological sites are left untouched, the remaining stands of vegetation in clear-cuts serve as an easy signal of where to dig for people who illegally search for prehistoric American Indian artifacts.

The same brush-clearing work that will reduce fire hazards also could make those sites less of a target and restore the health of the plant life once cultivated in American Indian villages, said Barbara Balen, an archeologist for the Calaveras Ranger District of the Stanislaus National Forest.

"I'm very interested in hand-removing the fuels around these archaeological sites," Balen said.